#picassoandwar

We chose to go to Musée de l’Armée to see the Picasso and War exhibit. Why you may ask? The art students wanted to see if Picasso was represented the same way in war as they had learned about, but the history students thought that this art exhibit might have some more history that we would be interested in.

The exhibit webpage says that they wanted to show how warfare influenced Picasso’s art throughout his life. He always said that his work was a journal that only he could understand. It states that the goal is to “explore the various ways that warfare informed and impacted Picasso’s creative output throughout his career.” They wanted to approach it chronologically and chrono-thematically by exhibiting Picasso’s works and archives along with other historical artifacts of the time period, focusing especially on the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and his painting of Guernica. As the pamphlet from the exhibit says, it is understood that he has pre and post Guernica works, and this exhibit will help explain how warfare impacted these eras of Picasso and his political stances.

I thought it was really interesting that the exhibit is being held in the Musée de l’Armée, a war museum. I mean, it makes sense because this exhibit is about understanding the effects of warfare. But at the same time, its art focused, so I didn’t expect to see works of art displayed in an Army museum. It surprised me how hard it was to get to the exhibit itself. We bought tickets and followed the signs, but it seemed like there were more signs after every corner. We finally got to the beginning of the exhibit on the third floor of a wing of the museum. The exhibit was also split into two hallways, so once you finished the first part, you had to walk back through it and across the atrium to the other hallway. This seemed very odd to me because usually famous artists have the best of the best areas for their art to be displayed. I really loved how the museum was set up. The chronological and chrono-thematic organization really helped my history-minded-self understand the art Picasso was creating. I also thought it was really cool that they had some of his drawings and sketches from his school days because those were so different than the distorted work that is so famously known of Picasso. I enjoyed the timelines presented at each stage of the exhibit because they had the events of the world, the events of Picasso’s life, and his paintings marked on them. The area that struck me most was the one titled “history painting – history is painting.” I think that this phrase is what the goal was of the exhibit: to portray Picasso’s art in a way for us to understand how the war-filled history impacted his content. I really enjoyed wandering the museum and reading about the history that happened while Picasso was creating different works. It helped me understand his art more and sympathize with the other people of that time period and what they had experienced.

For my visual analysis, I chose to do Le Vert Galant. Picasso painted in 1943, which is towards the end of the exhibit and a post-Guernica work of art. The material, oil on canvas, seems to be typical of what we see of Picasso’s work in museums. It really allows us to see the hand of the painter. Picasso’s brush strokes create the texture of the trees and the lawn beneath them, distinguishing the plants from the smooth buildings in the background. He also uses his brush stroke to create the leaves of the plants and trees. The color also distinguishes the buildings from the flora and fauna. Greys and neutral colors were used for the buildings and structures, while tones of green, a blueish color, and brown are used for the flora and fauna. Light is displayed in this paintings through darker green colors representing the shadows of the trees. The windows in the buildings also have darker shades of grey. The size is pretty similar to the other paintings in this gallery, yet larger than the drawings and sketches. I think that the subject is some sort of square (or place) and the tree lined path leads the eye to the monument in the middle of the painting.

I think it is important to compare art with history because it helps the viewer understand what the artist and the audience at the time were going through. This exhibit communicated their goal very well and it makes me want to understand the dialogue between history and art even more. 

Sources: https://www.musee-armee.fr/en/programme/exhibitions/detail/picasso-and-war.html?L=0&cHash=b5af99fb222f7767cba8e61fa37cae4c